An older man for reasons known only to him takes a young man who is on his last leg under his wing.
He shows him how to live the life of a gambler. It is not, let’s say, very romantic. But the old man (Philip Baker Hall) has a certain style and gravity and presence that’s lacking in young men everywhere.
A cocktail waitress calls him Captain. That name is a lot closer to the truth than his given sobriquet of Sydney.
We see the young man, (John C Reilly) respects this new mentor and begins to emulate him.
And then, well, life can take some turns man.
Hard Eight was written and directed by then first time director Paul Thomas Anderson in 1996. It really doesn’t suggest what Anderson’s movies would become.
The deep pain and longing and need for connection is there, certainly. But they are wrapped in low rent and low budget sort of crime film.
I wonder if he could have gotten the budget if the setting would have been more glamorous. I doubt it because none of these players are meant to be high rollers.
I watched Hard Eight years ago and watched it again tonight as I psych myself up and get ready for One Battle After Another.
IMDB claims that Anderson doesn’t talk about this movie all that often except to say that he didn’t understand back then how he needed to make the relationships between a director and his producer work to get what he wanted.
The movie was allegedly taken from him and the producer was going to cut it shorter. But Anderson won out when the flick got accepted into Cannes.
From the outside and knowing what we know now it’s hard to argue that anyone but Anderson should have the Final Cut on his movies. But consider that Anderson really wanted to call this flick “Sydney.”
That’s maybe the correct name for this film while also being a terrible name for a movie you want people to pay money to see.
This is probably the definition of a slow burn or maybe the first half of it is just required to be slow. The second half picks up nicely and features several violent crimes and at least one or two all timer “tough guy” lines.
But don’t misunderstand because this is not what I would call a tough guy flick. Even back at the beginning Anderson would never let a character be anything other than a rounded human being. That rules out most of the archetypes required to make a revenge picture or a crime picture actually work.
What we end up with is unique people placed in a few extraordinary circumstances.
A crime picture that doubles as a character study.
It works. I liked it. But I’m also very glad that Anderson found his groove on his next go round.
Watching The Killer again, this time on Tubi, though I really need to buy it.
Ok so this is always overshadowed in my mind by Hard Boiled (the greatest action movie of the 1990s) but The Killer might be better.
The love story is stronger, the connection between the killer and the cop is better and the action sequences … I had forgotten how amazing they are.
I think Chow Yun Fat looks cooler throughout Hard Boiled than he does here and that is a factor. I don’t think anyone looks as cool on screen as the characters in Hong Kong crime films in the late 80s and early 90s.
The guys in Heat, and Collateral are ice cold and sharp of course maybe and Al and his crew in Godfather 1 and 2 could rival the cops and gangsters from Hong Kong but, really, there’s nobody else who looks this stylish.
I wasn’t prepared for how good Danny Lee is here. He’s the real heart of this thing and he carries it magnificently.
Also, John Woo’s camera prowls around like a hungry lion and everytime Chow Yun Fat flies backwards while simultaneously firing two guns I’m thrilled in a way that I can hardly find in any other sort of flick.
Woo had a pretty good Hollywood career that included the high point of Face/Off but what he accomplished in his home country remains unmatched. And not just unmatched by his own work but also by nearly everyone else who imitated his style but couldn’t fly this close to the sun.
Caught Stealing is a serviceable entry in the crime genre. It’s got two, maybe three, really solid twists some interesting characters and once it starts moving it stays near the strike zone.
It definitely strives for that Elmore Leonard intersection of cool characters, crime mayhem and comedy.
I liked it but I didn’t love it though. First, the tone just shifts way too much. Is this a Hitchcockian thriller? You know, the wrong man caught up in a world of violence he doesn’t understand?
Is it a caper film? Is it a comedy? Is it about a man atoning for his biggest sin?
Unfortunately, it’s all of those things and a couple of more besides.
There is a plot turn really early on that sucked all the energy out of the proceedings. Then a twist a few scenes later kind of brought everything back and gave Regina King a better role.
I don’t think the movie ever recovered from this and I think Aronofsky and screenwriter Charlie Huston should have done something else. Easy for me to say, I suppose. There are plenty of arguments to do it and it drives the movie forward and gives us a nice twist near the end. Also, there is something unique about Austin Butler’s Hank Thompson continually getting his friends killed throughout the proceedings.
But the time and place for such a thing is in revenge movies. And instead of Butler’s phenom baseball player stalking the guys who killed his girl with a bat he spends most of the movie trying not to get shot.
Again, killing the girl works in a different movie, maybe, but not the one where Matt Smith is playing a punk straight of central casting and complete with a Mohawk, a leather jacket and an inability to discharge an uzi properly.
Her death and my belief that they should have just put her in a coma so she could come back at the end reminded me of two classic movie moments.
The first is that Director Tony Scott overruled then screenwriter Quentin Tarantino who wanted Christian Slater’s Clarence Worley dead by the end of True Romance.
Tarantino is a movie genius but Scott was absolutely right to let Clarence and his lover Alabama escape all that violence and ride off into the sunset together.
The second thing was that in Stephen King’s Misery, evil Annie actually cuts poor Paul Sheldon’s feet clean off. In the movie she break’s his feet at the ankles. So at the end, when James Caan survives you see him walking with a cane. Broken perhaps but not completely changed.
Screenwriter William Goldman argued that a book audience would be fine with poor Paul losing his feet and a movie audience would have never forgiven the filmmakers or the flick itself if the main character as permanently disfigured.
I’m telling you, put Zoe in a coma and have her come back in the last reel on the beach with our hero and you got movie magic. Instead, you got, a noir story perhaps, a movie about a guy losing everything.
Except it’s just not quite that either. This movie is a single, maybe a double but it’s nowhere close to a home run.
Anyway, Regina King is great, and I liked seeing Leiv Schrieber and Vincent D’Onofrio even if they don’t get enough screen time.
It’s a wonderful to see Griffin Dunne and Carol Kane even if they only get one scene a piece.
Everyone is cooking but the meal never quite satisfies. It’s happens that way something’s. Elmore Leonard wrote 45 novels but in the end Hollywood only made three perfect movies from his life’s work.
This is no Get Shorty. But it’s a damn sight better than Be Cool.
I was a young teenager when Jonah Hex: Two Gun Mojo, showed up on comic book shelves. I was a voracious reader but here was something completely unlike anything I had ever encountered.
Jonah was a western anti-hero created by writer John Albano and artist Tony DeZuniga in 1972. I don’t think anyone could argue that he was maybe one or two steps removed from Clint Eastwood’s poplar movie screen persona as the Man with No Name.
By the 1990s there no western heroes on the stand but Two Gun Mojo, written by Joe R. Lansdale with art by Timothy Truman started a mini revival of the genre. Lansdale and Truman reimagined Hex a bit and gave him supernatural villians and the book was, for a short time, the coolest thing on the stands.
The whole thing didn’t last long but Lansdale built a career that included books, and television and movies.
Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy, once said (I think) that his wife wanted him to just create something normal. Just draw superheroes or create a normal story and the cash will keep rolling in. Mignola, instead, created a hell creature that fought other hell creatures. Mignola later said (essentially) that he couldn’t do normal. As a writer and an artist his brain just wouldn’t work that way.
I think that applies to Lansdale as well. I mean, his biggest cultural hit was, for a time, Bubba Ho Tep. A book and later a movie (written and directed by Don Coscarelli) that posits that all those National Enquirer stories were true and Elvis never died, and he was now being stalked by a mummy while trying to live out his final days in a nursing home.
It was a minor hit and celebrated in the kind of fan circles I traveled in in 2002. But that was never going to be a a huge thing. Nobody was going to retire on their Bubba Ho Tep money.
His other successful stab at all of this is the Hap and Leonard book series. Eventually that was made into three seasons of television on The Sundance Network. A riveting crime show and frequently on critics best of the year of list.
But, consider the internet description of two main characters: Hap Collins, “a white working class laborer who spent time in federal prison as a young man for refusing to be drafted into the military and serve in the Vietnam War.”
His best friend is Leonard Pine, “a gay black Vietnam vet with serious anger issues.” Together they solve mysteries and fight crime.
Again, Lansdale has, as near as I can tell, built a nice career for himself with this and his other books.
But my goodness, much as I love this stuff, I would have to admit it’s an acquired taste.
While I’m rambling and before I go further let’s also recommend Cold in July a neo-western based on a Lansdale book and starring Sam Shepard and Don Johnson. You probably never saw it but it’s a cool slice of crime fiction.
Anyway, having proved my Lansdale bonifides and noting that I am always interested in his work even I didn’t make it to the theater last year to see The Thicket.
It was only in theaters for a few weeks, with no advertisements, and when I found it I couldn’t make the hour drive to the big nearby city to catch it. I got kids man.
It’s now on Amazon Prime and most of it is exceptional. Exactly the kind of tough talk and bloody mindedness you want in a movie where Peter Dinklage plays an old west bounty hunter.
As an actor he always delivers and here he gets to be a cowboy who reluctantly helps a young man (Levon Hawke) rescue his sister who was kidnapped by Cut Throat Bill (Juliette Lewis). Dinklage’s reluctance is more less based on a pretty good western trope. To paraphrase: “You haven’t seen violence, boy, and I have and it should be avoided at all costs.”
You know, that thing. As motivations go it’s a winner.
The other, is that the pay won’t be worth the risk. Again to paraphrase: “I might risk my life for something, but it won’t be some woman I don’t know and one third of $300.”
That was another excellent bit of business.
When we meet Dinklage’s character someone is trying to make fun of his height and cheat him out of money owed. You can guess how that conflict ends.
Meanwhile, Cut Throat Bill is mostly off in her own little movie doing an excellent job at being menacing, creepy and crazy. I suspect Juliet Lewis spent some time watching Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh.
It’s a movie that falls into a particular category for me which is: if this is the kind of thing you like then I think you will like this thing.
It succeeds and I enjoyed it but I would also tell you it has modest ambitions. A decent exercise in genre work that squeezes some fun out of Dinklage and Lewis being old west killers.
The movie cooks a bit when we hear a sermon from a doomed priest explaining Cut Throat Bill’s backstory. And again when her part of the tale concludes. Her final words in the movie is haunting.
So the movie gets to a really top shelf sort of place. But it doesn’t get there often and it doesn’t stay there.
Spoiler below:
The conclusion follows through with the warnings about how all this violence will end. And what the pursuit of righteousness in the face of evil might cost.
Ultimately, we are presented with a happy ending … for the survivors.
If they had hired a real actor to play Ian Holm’s character this would have been a solid Alien entry.
Doing it with CGI brings nothing to the table. If someone was making Godfather 2 today they would de-age Marlon Brando and DeNiro’s once in a lifetime performance as young Vito would be lost to the world.
What I’m trying to say is that the ghost in the machine threw me out of this film just as it was starting to cook.
Quit doing this.
The rest of this is fine. I’m not sure there’s any more meat on the bone for Alien as a franchise. The repeat of a famous phrase from the franchise in this flicks’ climax kind of proves the point.
But my interest in this and predator was never very strong. Make a good one and I’ll see it eventually. Make a bad one and it’s pretty much the same thing.
The final section of the movie had our heroine battling the final boss and her ship’s levers which all have to be pulled so that she can do a thing which will save her and kill it. Two sci-fi movie classics come to mind. A sequence in Galaxy Quest where the viewers discover the space ship is very complicated for no reason at all.
We have officially entered an era where we are replacing jokey fun with sincerity.
One the one hand this is about as good a movie as you could ever hope for for the Fantastic Four. On the other, like Superman, the characters carried so much baggage from four previous bites at the silver screen and a 60 year publishing history that this movie is swinging wildly in a new (and old) direction.
It’s strange to be in 2025 and watch something built on nostalgia for the 1960s but, again, of the available options this is probably the right one.
I think it was also a wise decision to turn most of the FF’s supervillains into either flash frame notes or flat out jokes, like the Mole Man. Would I have enjoyed three hour movie where you see the FF take on and defeat three or four of their biggest villains in 15 minute segments before getting to the Galactus main course? You bet!
But I’m not sure The Wizard or The Red Ghost is going to hold the attention of a general audience. A Paste-Pot Pete section tho … could have moved the needle.
Director Matt Shakman and a team of writers find a somewhat new way into the Galactus story even though it’s been done once on screen already and variations of it have been done in the comics since Stan and Jack delivered it in the 1960s.
When the central conflict was introduced I thought that the movie was on solid ground.
As I said about Superman I could show someone First Steps and tell them that this is mostly what a Fantastic Four comic felt like. Although only the Jack Kirby and Stan Lee ones. Almost anything that was invented after issue 100 is ignored.
And while whole sections of the MCU are built on his art and ideas this is the first real tribute and attempt at bringing a Jack Kirby joint to the screen. Galactus looks appropriately godlike and Kirbyesque. And that future Kirby tech and retrofuture design is all over the place.
FF and Superman show Hollywood taking the material as it is instead of thinking they know better than the people who came up with the stories that captured the hearts and minds of readers for generations.
Finally, when you do put kid Franklin in an FF uniform it does not say Fantastic 5. His shirt says 4 1/2.
History never ends, but this month, I think, gives us an exact stopping place for The Streaming Wars. On May 14, 2025, Warner Bros. announced that their streaming service, originally named HBOGO, then named HBONOW, then HBOMAX, then MAX will once again be called HBOMAX.
In my mind, that seems like a perfect stopping point, or perhaps a momentary ceasefire, in the streaming wars. Now is a solid time and place for us to look around and see where we’re at and what has become of us.
One bit of business first, though, if 2025 is the end, then where is the beginning? Netflix started streaming in 2007, and HBO GO followed in 2008. You could not subscribe to HBO GO, though; it was a place on the internet that would only allow you to watch their shows if you already had a cable subscription to the premium service. The Apple TV came along in these same momentous days. It launched in the same keynote as the iPhone in 2007.
Humanity was rapidly moving from a place where we interacted with other people in the physical world to the place where we are now, where many of us interact with one another mostly through a handheld supercomputer. We text, we get on social media, we watch television and movies, and then we review and compare notes about those experiences on a phone that we never put down.
For entertainment, we moved from theaters and television screens to phones and iPads. And from cable, which brought a set series of channels into your home, to a streaming box, which unlocked the internet to bring you whatever you wanted, provided you could find an app for that.
As for the start of the streaming wars, let’s go with November 12, 2019. That’s the launch of Disney Plus and the first time, but not the last, that the CEO of a giant corporation would announce that they were “all in” with this streaming thing. Things really ramped up during the pandemic when people were stuck at home. Suddenly, massive movie projects were being sent to streaming platforms. Decisions that made sense at the time, but have put movie studios and filmmakers in an awkward spot.
Two years ago, I went on a rant about all the things we lost along the way. My grievances still stand. We still can’t just go out to the internet, legally, and pay for whatever we want.
But lately I’ve been fascinated by how things get released and what that means culturally. Netflix pitched itself as something new not only by becoming an online entertainment venue but also in the way it released its material. Their audience wanted to binge shows, and so they would release a whole season of a show at once, and the audience could watch it all immediately and in any way they saw fit.
This strategy is a mistake. It pairs nicely with another mistake streamers made, that there was an audience for an 8-12 hour movie. As film hopefuls flocked to the money offered by streamers, they consoled themselves by suggesting they weren’t making icky television but were instead making long movies. But can you think of any of these long movies that were actually good? Resonated in the culture? Were they critically acclaimed?
What usually happens is they sag in the middle and might come around for a decent ending, but will have shed viewers and strained the patience of anyone who sticks it out.
The one place this does seem to work, and I’m arguing against myself here, is book adaptations. Depending on the book, the project might make more sense as a movie. But Shogun was great television, and it was nice to delve into the world week after week as its storyline drew to a climax and then a close. One of my current favorites, Slow Horses, does six-episode seasons, adapting one book from Mick Herron’s series each season.
That’s pretty wildly different from the television I grew up with. Back then, the networks only did book adaptations once or twice a year. They were cultural events known as the miniseries. The miniseries was once such a big deal that movie stars might occasionally be in them despite the hit to their reputations for taking a paycheck to be in something as base as television. Movie stars were also not allowed to be in commercials unless they only aired in Japan.
These were the rules, kids.
I tried out a new show the other day. Very much the kind of thing that can only exist in the streaming era. The premiere promises to follow two leads through an investigation into a crime boss. And when I was done with it … I was done with it. Because the premiere did not suggest that any of this would work week to week.
What it suggested, what a lot of streaming television suggests, is that someone wrote a movie, couldn’t sell it as a movie, and reworked it into a television show.
What I’m trying to say (both slowly and badly) is that from the outside, what works in television is what has always worked in television. A procedural (The Pitt, Poker Face), a soap opera (Andor, Severance, Daredevil), or a comedy (Abbott Elementary, Hacks, Righteous Gemstones) that releases weekly.
Even when streamers do stupid things — Andor released three episodes at a time in its second season, Hacks does two at a time, Poker Face started its second season with three episodes — the weekly release formula works.
Why? In the before times, it had to do with the distribution model. Television was a daily enterprise that was funded by commercials.
So, most weeks, the networks needed something new (preferably a new episode of something they knew audiences wanted) to show up on their screens and attract viewers who would suffer through the advertisements to find out if Matlock really would save his innocent client by getting the real murderer to confess on the stand.
And while that model mostly doesn’t exist anymore, it does appear to be the correct way to distribute television. This time for a different reason. The current reason is that we are social creatures who mostly want to yell at each other about politics and entertainment online. Sometimes we want to do both (ick), but occasionally we just want to scream into the void about this cool thing that happened on a show we like.
How did I end up watching every episode of The Pitt (which I love) and Severance? That happened because people online wouldn’t stop talking about them.
With The Pitt, it was great that even though I was four episodes behind, I could go back, binge what I missed, and then catch up week to week. That meant I could, if I wanted, join the conversation after each new episode. Or more likely lurk amongst the fans and enjoy the memes.
These are advantages to living in the streaming age.
So that’s television. In short, film a bunch of episodes of something, release it week to week, and hope that either the fans or the critics talk about it online. Probably helps if it is good, if it can be consumed an episode at a time, week to week, and I’ll give you bonus points if I can dip in on any episode and figure out what is going on. I won’t, I’ll watch it from the beginning, but you get the bonus points anyway.
The only exception to these rules is The Bear. It releases all of its episodes at once. And yet, everyone loves it and it remains culturally relevant for weeks at a time. I’m hoping the new season will be a full season of television, though, and not just an ASMR experiment like season 3.
Meanwhile, it seems that most of the streamers have realized their mistake. Many of them trying to get back to the safety of cable by bundling all their online offerings together in hopes of grabbing more of the market.
Even Netflix, which has hard and fast rules about releasing everything at once is positioning itself back towards traditional television.
Currently, they take their biggest series and split them up into parts. Releasing three or four episodes of Stranger Things and then doing it once or twice more each month for a few months. It seems like an attempt to keep the show running instead of releasing it all at once.
They should give that up sooner rather than later and go to weekly episodic releases.
Also, they have a nightlyish live talk show with John Mulaney and a weekly ad supporting live television show. This kind of show, in one format or another, has existed since the dawn of television and remains one of the biggest and highest rated types of TV. I’m referring, of course to professional wrestling. On Monday nights you can watch the entertainers at the WWE talk and duke it out live. As long as you are willing to sit through all those unskippable commercials.
We killed cable television just so we can rebuild cable television.
“We’re designed more for public than for private.”
This reminds me of professional wrestling. The thing about wrestling is that for decades people were satisfied to take it mostly at face value. Not so much that the audience believed it to be real but that they enjoyed it for the stage show production that it was.
A simple morality play, more or less, about a little guy (like you) who stands up and usually defeats a bully.
But in the 1990s real life and the internet intruded into the proceedings and the audiences and the performers started co-existing in a different way. With winks and nods from the performers fans were asked to believe that while other parts of the show were fake this storyline was real.
Stone Cold was fighting his real life boss (Vince McMahon really did own the WWE) and backstage politics really were holding some of the wrestlers at WCW back.
This played out in major storylines that purported to be real.
Of course, the thing about wrestling watching a wrestling show, a movie or reality TV is that it’s all a work. It’s all fake and even the stuff that has a kernel of truth is just grist for the mill.
It was a thought that never left me as I watched Postcards From The Edge. The movie is based on a novel written by Carrie Fisher, about her life as a movie star and a drug addict. The film centers on Fisher’s relationship with her famous mother, Debbie Reynolds.
Here’s a key line:
“You don’t want me to be a singer. You’re the singer. You’re the performer. I can’t possibly compete with you. What if somebody won?”
So the movie purports to show us life as a Hollywood actress with an overbearing movie star mom. Much of this, I didn’t really believe.
Some of it, surely, comes from real life events and conversations. The mom being accosted by fans while trying to visit the daughter in rehab has got to be a true story. Right?
However, drug addiction has never seemed so mild and alcoholism so controlled. OD’s don’t usually look that good when they arrive at the hospital.
Fisher’s love life is a disaster and her mother is crazy but at the end everyone comes to an understanding and there is a handsome doctor waiting in the wings.
It has this sheen of being too cute. Some scenes feel like they are required by the rules of screenwriting, the executive producer or the test audience.
Which, again, is nonsense. Because I have no idea what’s real and what isn’t. It’s just that some of it feels real and some of it doesn’t.
One little fact I enjoy is that Fisher’s book, apparently, hardly featured her famous mom at all.
And yet, Debbie Reynolds — movie star — would not be denied.
In 1996 and 1997, I was a senior in high school and working in a movie theater.
Life was good. I had no idea how good life can be when you are in high school or how hard life can get once you leave. You can’t tell any 17-year-old that stuff. They just have to find it out on their own. They have to live it.
I watched everything that came in and out of the Carmike Cinema in Panama City, Florida for those two years. Fargo, Mission: Impossible, L.A Confidential, and Twister, among many others. The theater did a friends and family only midnight showing of Independence Day with the sound turned up to ear-splitting levels. It was a helluva thing.
Again, you have no idea how good life can be sometimes.
Chasing Amy came out in 1997. Chasing Amy is a movie about young people trying to navigate adult sexual relationships while also dealing with their own inadequacies, fears, frustrations, and religious upbringing.
“I am not used to this sort of thing,” one character says about the sexual exploits of his girlfriend at one point. “I mean, I was raised Catholic, for God’s sake.”
It was a personal story that writer-director Kevin Smith had written about his own failed relationship. It is both incredibly frank about sex and also sweet and romantic in its own weird way. It’s one of the best movies of the 1990s and a personal favorite.
Kevin Smith speaking at a Dogma screening in Chicago.
Smith followed Chasing Amy with Dogma. A movie about how the Catholic Church is going to accidentally wipe out all of existence, at least in part, because they want to appeal to young people with a new, hipper version of the faith.
In the opening scene, George Carlin, playing Cardinal Glick, explains that “Holy Mother Church” has decided to retire images of Christ hanging on the cross and replace them with a friendly version of the Savior. This one has a big smile and is giving the world a wink and a giant thumbs up.
“Christ didn’t come to earth to give us the willies. He was a booster.” Glick said. “I give you the buddy Christ. … Look at it, doesn’t it pop.”
I’m giggling a little bit, just now, thinking about that scene.
If Chasing Amy was everything Smith had to say about relationships, then Dogma featured his thoughts on religion and, in particular, the Catholic church of his alter boy youth. It was made by a guy who, at the time, still believed, and while it certainly takes the church to task, (and will go anywhere in pursuit of a laugh), it doesn’t waiver from the idea that there is a real God up there who loves his (her) children.
Despite its tough subject matter, a huge protest campaign from the Catholic League, and several legitimate death threats, Dogma was a hit.
Smith had been working with an unknown actor named Ben Affleck since Mallrats in 1995. He gave him the lead role of Chasing Amy in 1997.
Then, when another actor bowed out of a role, he was able to pair up Affleck with his lifelong pal Matt Damon as rogue angels trying to return to Heaven. Only a year after the duo broke through together on Good Will Hunting.
These were still early days for Matt and Ben, but you can see on screen why they were both going to be massive stars.
For reasons that Smith will recount to you in other places, Dogma has been unavailable anywhere since its initial run on home video. It never made it to the streaming services, and the rights to get it back out did not stay with Smith. However, recently, a company acquired it and asked Smith what he wanted to do with it.
So he’s taking it on the road to AMC theaters and doing a Q and A after the screenings.
If you haven’t seen him, Smith is as good on the mic as any comic. His director career is almost secondary to a podcast career and a series of personal appearances that are essentially Hollywood tell-all, stand-ups.
I saw him, and a lot of other interesting folks, at a sold-out screening in Chicago this weekend. It was a crowd full of both young people and those of us who were around for the initial run of Dogma.
During the Q and A I asked him a poorly worded question about Affleck and Damon and got a hilarious response about how Damon always talked about how he sucked in every scene no matter how transcendent the acting was. Meanwhile, Affleck was the only actor who would come to the run-through of dailies and would sit there making comments about how thoroughly awesome his work had been that day.
“Look at that guy. Pimp,” was Affleck’s assessment of himself according to Smith.
You might recoil at that, and Smith was just telling a funny little story, but also, it’s true. Affleck is correct when Affleck tells you he’s awesome.
He and Damon nail every scene, no matter how ridiculous, and while other parts of the movie might waiver, anytime the flick moves back to the angels, it delivers another miraculously funny bit.
It’s nearly 30 years later, but there is still a chance that I might randomly yell at someone, “You didn’t say God bless you when I sneezed!”
Hopefully someone who has seen Dogma, but maybe not. I’m quirky that way.
Dogma has a lot of other things going for it besides the Affleck and Damon partnership. Kevin Smith can craft a solid joke:
Cardinal Glick: Fill them pews, people, that’s the key. Grab the little ones as well. Hook ’em while they’re young.
Rufus: Kind of like the tobacco industry?
Cardinal Glick: Christ, if only we had their numbers.
Among his other talents, Smith can also pay off a setup. At the end of the film, Jay tries to call in a promise from one of the opening scenes, and it’s a huge laugh every time.
And getting George Carlin to play a Cardinal, Alan Rickman to play the voice of God and Chris Rock to be Rufus, the 13th Apostle (who was left out of the bible because he was black) is perfect casting.
Meanwhile, Linda Fiorentino has to thread a really tight needle of taking on all the sincere parts of a story. Bethany, still recovering from a divorce because she couldn’t have children, finds out that she is the last living connection to Jesus Christ, and must go on a holy mission to stop the end of existence. She is also required to be the straight woman to the Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob joke machine.
Sometimes you return to a movie and you realize how young you were when you saw it and it doesn’t hold up, Some comedies fail on the second or third viewing because the jokes just fall flat. You can only be surprised once
But it wasn’t that way for me with Dogma. It’s still really funny. It has some interesting things to say about religion. I disagree on some points and agree on others; your mileage and faith may vary. And beyond its dissertation about organized religion, I think Dogma has some real insights about human nature and about the God that Kevin Smith grew up believing in.
As a writer, Smith is up there with David Mamet, Aaron Sorkin, and Quentin Tarantino. He’s someone you can recognize just by listening to their dialogue. As a director, he’s usually worked on shoestring budgets, doing what he must to tell the story and not much more than that.
Dogma has several moments where Smith plays with a bigger canvas, including the havoc of a near armageddon. It also has a giant fight scene with a poop monster that happens off camera because there was no money to film it.
When it comes to his fans, Smith continues to work hard to make them happy. After the movie, he did a lengthy Q and A. He answered one question from nearly everyone in the sold-out theater and did selfies with cosplayers.
I want to tell you some of the amusing anecdotes, but I’m afraid I’ll drain the life out of them. The stories are funny when Kevin Smith tells them, but probably less so when I’m dryly regurgitating them.
But I’ll leave you with one.
Apparently, Buddy Christ has started to pop up in actual church campaigns from actual churches. Proving, I think, when you send something out in the world, you never know what will become of it.
When Jason Mewes saw it, he turned to Kevin and said, “We should sue.”
To which Kevin replied, “We don’t own Jesus, man.”
Sinners features a sequence that is either the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen a director do or the bravest.
A perfect encapsulation of what you can do in film if are willing to trust your gut and acknowledge that there are no rules in this thing. Great films have only creators following their particular muse towards glory or crushing failure.
As you can see, when it comes to it, I’m leaning toward the bravest thing I have ever seen.
Whatever else Sinners might be, horror, action or gangster picture, it is ultimately a vampire musical.
Like the works of The Coen Brothers or Quentin Tarantino — O Brother Where Art Thou and From Dusk Til Dawn are both touchstones for this extravaganza — filmmaker Ryan Coogler mostly just wants to entertain you.
That means the music is rollicking and the action is kinetic, horrible and beautiful. This is also pretty much everything you want in a vampire flick and it’s instantly among the greats including Dusk Til Dawn, Near Dark, various Draculas and The Lost Boys.
It is also, as is appropriate for a vampire flick, intensely romantic, sexual and haunting.
The movie is great but the marketing hurt it by letting us know about two characters who get turned into vampires.
And there is a bit of a build and set up before we get to the fireworks factory. But all that is worth it once we get to the killing and the singing and dancing.
I saw it in IMAX 70 millimeter. And I’m not telling you that for any reason other than to brag.
Dark Highways 